We're attending the Adventure Elevate Travel conference in Saguenay, Quebec now. As part of the welcome, they took the attendees on various tours of the area. You could sign up for a variety of activities, including canoeing, hiking, biking, and, for me, bear watching.
Of the hundreds of attendees, only three of us chose to track the elusive bears, (along with some canoeing and hiking.) The guides of the Okwari Aventures (and, yes, I spelled that right; it's French,) led us around the Mars River, showed us a beaver dam, called some moose (none came,) and finally led us to a blind where we could watch an area where they'd set out a small pile of aromatic bear food.
We waiting for twenty minutes or so, and just before we had to leave, this juvenile bear showed up to sniff around. The guide told us that he was probably two years old, and had just separated for the first time from his mother. Since he was on his own for the first time, he was very wary as he shuffled around the area.
The young bears are taught by their mothers to be especially wary of other male bears, as they will kill cubs who are still with a female in an attempt to get the female to mate again. So this guy, although he was probably no longer in any danger, was very cautious nevertheless. Indeed, if the wind so much as rustled the leaves, he'd bound away and climb up the tree a little and look around before coming down again quickly to investigate the food.
So cute! Did he ever feel confident enough to eat every bit of the aromatic bear food?
We, unfortunately, had to leave before he did, so we didn’t get to see him finish. There wasn’t very much of it, since the guides don’t want to make them dependent. They only put out food very sporadically. He did have a couple of paws worth while we watched, however.